OK, I realise that I've been a bit grumpy and critical of some things recently. But before everyone assumes I'm getting more cantankerous as I get older, I'm actually going to say something nice for once:
I really like the little Novatel MiFi unit I've been playing with the last couple of days. (Peter Judge does too). For the uninitiated, it's a cross between a 3G dongle modem, a WiFi access point and a Linux-powered device.
Basically it's a portable, battery-powered personal "hotspot" that up to 5 people/devices can log onto, multiplexing their data traffic through a single SIM and data connection. Various larger, chunkier 3G routers have been around for quite a while, mostly for residential use, but this one is small, cute, and doesn't need to be plugged into a power socket. You could also compare it to using a 3G handset as a modem/tether.
At one level, it's nice just as a standalone product, especially if you have lots of devices, or work in a small team. It means you don't have to install connection-manager software onto your computer - or worry about conflicts with an existing clients. It just uses the normal WiFi connection, and appears in the list of other WiFi AP's your PC can hook up to. It's also good to have your mobile broadband being powered by a separate battery, rather than mentally juggling your own power budget between screen and modem.
Part of the cleverness, though, is the fact that it's programmable - if sold via an operator (or another channel), it can have various additional capabilities. It doesn't have an open SDK or set of public APIs, but in theory it could be usable for all sorts of cool things - coupled with its memory-card slot for example, an operator could choose to push video or other content down to it during quiet network periods. I'm probably a long way ahead of the curve here, but I guess in the long term something like this could probably be used in conjunction with a content-delivery network or web cacheing architecture.
More prosaically, I can operators trying to charge extra for a MiFi-enabled mobile broadband plan than for a simpler dongle-based one.
On the downside, if I'd bought it via retail I'd have to find a good data-only SIM and tariff. Not too tricky in the UK, but harder in places like the US. You'd have to go via the (quite simple) admin screen on the device to set up the APN and other config settings. It's not obvious to me how it handles SMS-based alerts from the network ("You're nearing your monthly bandwidth cap") although that's a minor niggle.
The one problem I can foresee though is around network data capacity - in areas with congestion, do operators really want to risk too many five-in-one connections? Will it further increase data consumption, without adding revenues in similar proportion.
I'd quite like to see a dual- or triple-SIM version, allowing the user to pick & choose which network to use. The OS could even perform a least-cost routing function, as it has GPS in it. "Hmm, I'm in Spain, I'll use the Yoigo SIM instead of roaming on Vodafone".
One other thing: it looks really good. With a couple of LEDs blinking on the outside, I've had a few people come and say it looks interesting.....
Report: Mobile Broadband Computing
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Rant: Virtual conferences - come back in 2015
Everyone is finding costs tight at the moment. Travel budgets have been slashed, time away from work needs to be justified, everyone is looking for savings. Part of this involves working "virtually" - by phone, by videoconference and so forth. There has been a huge upswing of interest in collaboration technologies, online conferencing and so forth.
For certain use cases - especially internal meetings between team-members - this is OK. Maybe sales meetings with clients, where both parties know each other well, and have access to high-end telepresence rigs and dedicated rooms and high-bandwidth connections. Also, events like public webinars which are 90% "broadcast" and 10% Q&A seem to work OK, up to a point.
But for multi-party, interactive, conferences, it's an atrocious model. It just does not work. Period.
I've attended two supposed online analyst "events" this week - beyond the basic webinar. Both have used some awful metaphor of a virtual conference hall, complete with tacky "lobby" graphics. I'm not going to enumerate all the technical difficulties & useability issues - but I've had enough crashing browsers, random/multiple passwords, indifferent sound quality, interminable logins etc to last me a very long time. Using a netbook with a small screen makes everything worse, too - I can't imagine trying to do this on a phone.
Put it this way - I have 3 PCs with different browsers. All of them crashed or failed to display one of the events at least once. The last straw for me - and the one that prompted this post - was when the after-event "what did you think?" feedback page crashed Firefox.
I hate it when some conferencing app "maximises" itself on my screen - how am I supposed to type notes into a text document? I absolutely abhor the inability to download complete presentations in advance - yes, I know you don't want people to flip ahead, but I'm sorry, I *do* and I'm the "customer" here. I want to know if the next 60 mins will be relevant to me, or go back a slide, or prepare questions for later on. I'm not interested in video, at all.
I have no problem with remote events - but please, please, PLEASE just send me a dial-in number (UK-based or Skype) and email me the Powerpoint.
I haven't - and won't - attend a full large-scale virtual "industry forum", say with 200 participants. Everyone knows that the true value isn't in the sessions, it's in chatting with peers over lunch or a coffee break. It's the little conversations (or even nods/headshakes) with your neighbour. Also, it's "too democratic": I want to be able to make eye-contact with the moderator, who will recognise me & know I'll have a good question, and allow me to interrupt. If I'm chairing the event, I want to see people's eyes, notice attention-span rising and falling, look at what makes people put down their batteries. I want to shake the speakers' hands and swap business cards.
Bottom line - there are plenty of good roles for collaboration tools. But events and conferences aren't in that category. Certainly not now, possibly not ever.
For certain use cases - especially internal meetings between team-members - this is OK. Maybe sales meetings with clients, where both parties know each other well, and have access to high-end telepresence rigs and dedicated rooms and high-bandwidth connections. Also, events like public webinars which are 90% "broadcast" and 10% Q&A seem to work OK, up to a point.
But for multi-party, interactive, conferences, it's an atrocious model. It just does not work. Period.
I've attended two supposed online analyst "events" this week - beyond the basic webinar. Both have used some awful metaphor of a virtual conference hall, complete with tacky "lobby" graphics. I'm not going to enumerate all the technical difficulties & useability issues - but I've had enough crashing browsers, random/multiple passwords, indifferent sound quality, interminable logins etc to last me a very long time. Using a netbook with a small screen makes everything worse, too - I can't imagine trying to do this on a phone.
Put it this way - I have 3 PCs with different browsers. All of them crashed or failed to display one of the events at least once. The last straw for me - and the one that prompted this post - was when the after-event "what did you think?" feedback page crashed Firefox.
I hate it when some conferencing app "maximises" itself on my screen - how am I supposed to type notes into a text document? I absolutely abhor the inability to download complete presentations in advance - yes, I know you don't want people to flip ahead, but I'm sorry, I *do* and I'm the "customer" here. I want to know if the next 60 mins will be relevant to me, or go back a slide, or prepare questions for later on. I'm not interested in video, at all.
I have no problem with remote events - but please, please, PLEASE just send me a dial-in number (UK-based or Skype) and email me the Powerpoint.
I haven't - and won't - attend a full large-scale virtual "industry forum", say with 200 participants. Everyone knows that the true value isn't in the sessions, it's in chatting with peers over lunch or a coffee break. It's the little conversations (or even nods/headshakes) with your neighbour. Also, it's "too democratic": I want to be able to make eye-contact with the moderator, who will recognise me & know I'll have a good question, and allow me to interrupt. If I'm chairing the event, I want to see people's eyes, notice attention-span rising and falling, look at what makes people put down their batteries. I want to shake the speakers' hands and swap business cards.
Bottom line - there are plenty of good roles for collaboration tools. But events and conferences aren't in that category. Certainly not now, possibly not ever.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Under-the-floor to Over-the-top
One interesting trend I'm starting to see early signs of: the transition of some mobile or fixed operators (aka "under the floor providers") to becoming access-independent service providers ("over the top players").
This is where an established vertically-integrated network operator starts providing branded applications and services to users of *other* operators.
Top of the list here is Vodafone, which has already pushed ahead with a branded presence on Facebook and which has also started playing with an iPhone app which works on non-Vodafone supplied Apple handsets.
In the past, BT has also dabbled in this area, with an enterprise-centric branded softphone client for Windows Mobile devices, which was also aimed partly at users with phones provided through other operators.
I'm keeping a very close eye on this - I think that this is one of the greatest taboos in the mobile industry, where one operator could partly "own" the customer of another carrier. Normally the same bogeymen get rolled out by spokespeople: "those nasty Skype / Google / FaceBook / BBC iPlayer people are using our network for free". It will be interesting to see how the rhetoric changes when it's one of their direct peers, instead.
In some ways, it's a similar situation to using Carrier A's femtocell over Carrier B's broadband.
My view is that it's an extremely healthy development - if you're Vodafone, or for that matter NTT DoCoMo or a small mobile operator from Africa, why *shouldn't* you have inhouse-developed cool mobile apps, which you want to make available to everyone, not just people on your own network? Sure, maybe you *optimise* for people who have both access+app from you, but why not distribute your software as widely as possible?
This is particularly relevant in areas like backup 0r network-based address books. I've long said that these are being viewed by some in the industry as lock-in tools to reduce churn, rather than as good services intended to generate loyalty (and ideally revenue) in their own right.
It will be interesting to see if Vodafone turns Zyb into a true cross-operator platform, competing with "native" services by individual carriers. They could certainly cite "contact portability" as a prime advantage. It's interesting that Big Red hasn't rebranded Zyb to "Vodafone Contact Manager" or similar - perhaps in this scenario, overdoing the rival branding is counterproductive?
It will also be interesting to see if BT can resist any charges of hypocrisy, if it offers any more services that take a "free ride" on other fixed or mobile networks - given its recent controversial statements about charging web video providers for QoS. In fact, any network provider that complains about "over the top players" is setting themselves up as a hostage to fortune when they find a great service that *they* want to distribute to a broader global audience.
One thing this will likely accelerate is the desire for operators for inhouse-controlled AppStores, where they have right-of-refusal for apps they decide they don't like.
This is where an established vertically-integrated network operator starts providing branded applications and services to users of *other* operators.
Top of the list here is Vodafone, which has already pushed ahead with a branded presence on Facebook and which has also started playing with an iPhone app which works on non-Vodafone supplied Apple handsets.
In the past, BT has also dabbled in this area, with an enterprise-centric branded softphone client for Windows Mobile devices, which was also aimed partly at users with phones provided through other operators.
I'm keeping a very close eye on this - I think that this is one of the greatest taboos in the mobile industry, where one operator could partly "own" the customer of another carrier. Normally the same bogeymen get rolled out by spokespeople: "those nasty Skype / Google / FaceBook / BBC iPlayer people are using our network for free". It will be interesting to see how the rhetoric changes when it's one of their direct peers, instead.
In some ways, it's a similar situation to using Carrier A's femtocell over Carrier B's broadband.
My view is that it's an extremely healthy development - if you're Vodafone, or for that matter NTT DoCoMo or a small mobile operator from Africa, why *shouldn't* you have inhouse-developed cool mobile apps, which you want to make available to everyone, not just people on your own network? Sure, maybe you *optimise* for people who have both access+app from you, but why not distribute your software as widely as possible?
This is particularly relevant in areas like backup 0r network-based address books. I've long said that these are being viewed by some in the industry as lock-in tools to reduce churn, rather than as good services intended to generate loyalty (and ideally revenue) in their own right.
It will be interesting to see if Vodafone turns Zyb into a true cross-operator platform, competing with "native" services by individual carriers. They could certainly cite "contact portability" as a prime advantage. It's interesting that Big Red hasn't rebranded Zyb to "Vodafone Contact Manager" or similar - perhaps in this scenario, overdoing the rival branding is counterproductive?
It will also be interesting to see if BT can resist any charges of hypocrisy, if it offers any more services that take a "free ride" on other fixed or mobile networks - given its recent controversial statements about charging web video providers for QoS. In fact, any network provider that complains about "over the top players" is setting themselves up as a hostage to fortune when they find a great service that *they* want to distribute to a broader global audience.
One thing this will likely accelerate is the desire for operators for inhouse-controlled AppStores, where they have right-of-refusal for apps they decide they don't like.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Touchscreens and widgets - the promise vs reality on the Nokia N97
I'm a little wary of writing this post - I'm quite aware that opinions about specific devices are really subjective, based on your expectations, your own personal way of using phones, what you feel is important and so on. I'm also well aware that implementations vary, software and hardware gets updates, and all sorts of little contextual things make a difference, such as the precise configuration of a given service provider's network.
Also, I don't do "product reviews". Occasionally I'll play around with a device, which I might have bought with my own money, borrowed from a friend, or (as in this case) had sent to me for evaluation. I try and use them pretty much as I would "normally", albeit with a bit more inquisitiveness to see how some of the less usual features work. So for example, I tend not to read instruction manuals - I reckon most things should be intuitive.
I've been using Nokia's N97 for the last week or so. It is (I think) production-spec and not a prototype. The one I have is "vanilla" in both colour and configuration - ie it's not an operator-specific variant, just ex-factory with (I presume) a UK-specific bias as it came with a British-style plug.
And I'm sorry, but it is without doubt the most frustrating phone I have ever used. It's pretty rare that I swear at inanimate objects, but my language has been pretty fruity for the past few days. If you ever encounter either PM Gordon Brown or model Naomi Campbell with an N97 (both well-known as phone-throwers) I'd advise you to take cover.
Before I get a deluge of flames, I'd point out that I'm not a Nokia-hater. I've been using an E71 for months as my main web/email device and quite like it. It's not without faults, but it's a great piece of engineering and it's pretty predictable in the way it behaves, so I can work around the idiosyncracies.
The N97 is not predictable.
It's not a bad-looking device (although a bit chunky), and has a decent-enough QWERTY. It doesn't scream "tactile" and "design" in the way the E71 or iPhone does, but it's not as plasticky as some past smartphones either.
First, the touchscreen is pretty weak, and the software integration with the touchscreen is worse. It seems totally random whether a swipe makes things scroll or not, and with some apps you have to find some sort of "sweet spot" to do page-up/down. Possibly something to do with resistive vs. capacitative, but whatever, it's very poor compared to the iPhone. Sometimes there's lag (especially in the browser) so you tap again when you think nothing's happening - which then triggers two actions in a row when it finally wakes up. There's a separate stylus in the box (on a lanyard, not integrated into the body of the phone) which clearly seems to be an afterthought.
The first day I had it, I found the battery life to be abominable. Really. It ate two big 1500mAH batteries within 30 hours - with no use of video, voice or music. Since then it has seemed to be mostly OK, which is a relief, but I don't quite trust it yet. It may have been because I was on the edge of signal coverage at a conference, and it was flipping radio state all the time. It might have been because of widgets and automated "pull" email, or perhaps some background tasks or whatever. I didn't fiddle with the settings, so whatever happened was default mode. It felt quite warm at times, which suggested that something might have been going on, either keeping the radio alive or some sort of software loop using the processor. Either way, not impressive.
The orientation sensor and software integration is very patchy. Does an app (or the menu?) rotate when you go from portrait to landscape mode? Do you need to flip out the keyboard to trigger the landscape mode? Who knows, seems totally random. I found the "sensor settings" menu with "turning control", which made things a bit better, but again scrolling is often tricky and you need to open the keypad to get to the 4-way controller for fine-grained choice of links or menu items. Pity that on at least one app I tried, it didn't realise that the 4-way was therefore 90degrees different, so down/up got transposed as left/right on screen, confusingly.
Initially, I thought the home-screen widgets and applications were OK. But I've found them to be one of the biggest nightmares, especially the Facebook app. It seems to randomly log me out, or hang"Loading... please wait". Clicking on it does nothing. Or it gives other random & confusing error messages.
But the worst was yesterday - I was away over the weekend, and switched off the cellular radio, to avoid roaming charges, just using WiFi instead. I got back to the UK, and the Facebook widget on the homescreen repeatedly tried to connect to a WiFi point I'd used, giving confusing error messages and referring to the "options" menu and changing the connection settings. The Options menu on the homescreen doesn't have a settings tab. So I fired up the main Facebook app. No options menu at all. But an error message every 3 seconds, and repeated attempts to connect to the now-phantom WiFi. I deleted the homescreen widget, then went to the main WiFi connection config screen. No way to delete that AP, no way to turn WiFi off entirely. I ended up deleting the Facebook app, convinced it was bugged. Then I launched the browser - and once again, I get the WiFi SSID from a Budapest cafe, rather than the 3G network. Ah-hah! The browser does have an Options menu, and eventually I could change the connection preferences.
This is possibly a fatal flaw with the whole widget phenomenon - if they're using the browser "engine", they also use the browser's settings. Most people won't know this, or think to look. If something's awry with the browser, that also screws up all its associated widgets. I found myself glaring & swearing at the phone - apologies if you were on the Heathrow Express yesterday evening and saw my exasperation. And there seems to be no way to configure the homescreen to show 2 separate sets of email widgets, one from my work email and one from my personal address. (And the widgets are labelled "content" on the menu, ugh - as in "hide content" or "edit content". Horrible, horrible term used by nobody outside the industry, and inappropriate in this instance anyway).
When the widgets work OK, that's fine. But I found myself wanting to get rid of them all and just go back to a nice plain homescreen, with menus & softkeys that had no mention of "content".
Another inconsistency: the screen backlight turns off & the phone locks after a period. That's sort of OK, but you need to use an external hardware switch to turn it back on. It even seems to turn off while mid-task, eg downloading big web pages. You can't just tap/swipe it alive again, you need to use the switch. And about 20% of the time when it unlocks, backlight doesn't come back on, competely randomly. The keypad's live, but you can't see the screen.
Other things:
- The EMail client is atrocious - not just usual S60-bad, but with really poor integration with touchscreen. Flipping through emails is painful, especially ones with HTML which comes through as an attachment needing the browser to open. Poor use of screen resolution - all you can see without clicking on a message is "about 20 characters of sender & title, even in landscape mode
- Menu organisation is frustrating. Moving apps to the bottom of the list makes them disappear. Somewhere there's a sub-menu or page 2, but it seems completely unclear how I accidentally found it.
- It took me more than 5 minutes to find the settings menu & work out how to turn off the (default!) annoying keytones. And some apps seem to unilaterally switch them back on again.
- The radio reception is flaky. It's much worse than my E71 with the same SIM & network in any given location, often only giving me 3G rather than 3.5G.
- The camera sucks, surprisingly - I expected it to be really good, but it's worse than the not-particularly accomplished one in my SonyEricsson. Might be Version 1 software again, but I'm glad I had a proper camera with me for the weekend. No proper flash either, just LEDs, pretty dismal on a top-end phone. And when you zoom in on some photos, it goes to about 2x... then displays a black screen if you drill down further.
The Ovi store has been discussed elsewhere, so I won't comment further. I'm also guessing there's not many N97-tailored apps yet, so maybe the selection will get better. It needs to.
I could go on. Bottom line, there's a lot of good stuff in the device (32GB memory etc), but the screen & UI just don't work intuitively. Just too much is frustrating. Nokia should have spent less time & money on fripperies (FM transmitter - cool, but who cares?) and more on power management and a better touch experience.
It's a shame - I wanted to get a bit of a reaction from my iPhone-toting friends, especially as the 3G S is only an incremental upgrade rather than a complete redesign. But I'm putting the SIM back in the E71 instead, so they won't even get to see it.
I'm sure there's a bunch of other cool stuff in the phone (I saw apps from Qik, Joiku and others, although no Skype), but I can't suffer the basics of the phone to make an attempt to try them out.
One last point - it looks really geeky when it's opened, like the MDA Vario 3, with the flip-up screen and (for real!) the spec printed on the hinge when open. Having "3G HSDPA. USB 2.0. FM RDS" written on your handset's exterior reminds me of a Mercedes E-class I saw once, on which the owner had put a handmade "Air Conditioning" sticker next to the model number E320.
Sorry for this guys, as I know a lot of people must have put a lot of effort into building this - but Apple isn't going to have any sleepless nights unless there's a serious attempt at a Version 2.
Also, I don't do "product reviews". Occasionally I'll play around with a device, which I might have bought with my own money, borrowed from a friend, or (as in this case) had sent to me for evaluation. I try and use them pretty much as I would "normally", albeit with a bit more inquisitiveness to see how some of the less usual features work. So for example, I tend not to read instruction manuals - I reckon most things should be intuitive.
I've been using Nokia's N97 for the last week or so. It is (I think) production-spec and not a prototype. The one I have is "vanilla" in both colour and configuration - ie it's not an operator-specific variant, just ex-factory with (I presume) a UK-specific bias as it came with a British-style plug.
And I'm sorry, but it is without doubt the most frustrating phone I have ever used. It's pretty rare that I swear at inanimate objects, but my language has been pretty fruity for the past few days. If you ever encounter either PM Gordon Brown or model Naomi Campbell with an N97 (both well-known as phone-throwers) I'd advise you to take cover.
Before I get a deluge of flames, I'd point out that I'm not a Nokia-hater. I've been using an E71 for months as my main web/email device and quite like it. It's not without faults, but it's a great piece of engineering and it's pretty predictable in the way it behaves, so I can work around the idiosyncracies.
The N97 is not predictable.
It's not a bad-looking device (although a bit chunky), and has a decent-enough QWERTY. It doesn't scream "tactile" and "design" in the way the E71 or iPhone does, but it's not as plasticky as some past smartphones either.
First, the touchscreen is pretty weak, and the software integration with the touchscreen is worse. It seems totally random whether a swipe makes things scroll or not, and with some apps you have to find some sort of "sweet spot" to do page-up/down. Possibly something to do with resistive vs. capacitative, but whatever, it's very poor compared to the iPhone. Sometimes there's lag (especially in the browser) so you tap again when you think nothing's happening - which then triggers two actions in a row when it finally wakes up. There's a separate stylus in the box (on a lanyard, not integrated into the body of the phone) which clearly seems to be an afterthought.
The first day I had it, I found the battery life to be abominable. Really. It ate two big 1500mAH batteries within 30 hours - with no use of video, voice or music. Since then it has seemed to be mostly OK, which is a relief, but I don't quite trust it yet. It may have been because I was on the edge of signal coverage at a conference, and it was flipping radio state all the time. It might have been because of widgets and automated "pull" email, or perhaps some background tasks or whatever. I didn't fiddle with the settings, so whatever happened was default mode. It felt quite warm at times, which suggested that something might have been going on, either keeping the radio alive or some sort of software loop using the processor. Either way, not impressive.
The orientation sensor and software integration is very patchy. Does an app (or the menu?) rotate when you go from portrait to landscape mode? Do you need to flip out the keyboard to trigger the landscape mode? Who knows, seems totally random. I found the "sensor settings" menu with "turning control", which made things a bit better, but again scrolling is often tricky and you need to open the keypad to get to the 4-way controller for fine-grained choice of links or menu items. Pity that on at least one app I tried, it didn't realise that the 4-way was therefore 90degrees different, so down/up got transposed as left/right on screen, confusingly.
Initially, I thought the home-screen widgets and applications were OK. But I've found them to be one of the biggest nightmares, especially the Facebook app. It seems to randomly log me out, or hang"Loading... please wait". Clicking on it does nothing. Or it gives other random & confusing error messages.
But the worst was yesterday - I was away over the weekend, and switched off the cellular radio, to avoid roaming charges, just using WiFi instead. I got back to the UK, and the Facebook widget on the homescreen repeatedly tried to connect to a WiFi point I'd used, giving confusing error messages and referring to the "options" menu and changing the connection settings. The Options menu on the homescreen doesn't have a settings tab. So I fired up the main Facebook app. No options menu at all. But an error message every 3 seconds, and repeated attempts to connect to the now-phantom WiFi. I deleted the homescreen widget, then went to the main WiFi connection config screen. No way to delete that AP, no way to turn WiFi off entirely. I ended up deleting the Facebook app, convinced it was bugged. Then I launched the browser - and once again, I get the WiFi SSID from a Budapest cafe, rather than the 3G network. Ah-hah! The browser does have an Options menu, and eventually I could change the connection preferences.
This is possibly a fatal flaw with the whole widget phenomenon - if they're using the browser "engine", they also use the browser's settings. Most people won't know this, or think to look. If something's awry with the browser, that also screws up all its associated widgets. I found myself glaring & swearing at the phone - apologies if you were on the Heathrow Express yesterday evening and saw my exasperation. And there seems to be no way to configure the homescreen to show 2 separate sets of email widgets, one from my work email and one from my personal address. (And the widgets are labelled "content" on the menu, ugh - as in "hide content" or "edit content". Horrible, horrible term used by nobody outside the industry, and inappropriate in this instance anyway).
When the widgets work OK, that's fine. But I found myself wanting to get rid of them all and just go back to a nice plain homescreen, with menus & softkeys that had no mention of "content".
Another inconsistency: the screen backlight turns off & the phone locks after a period. That's sort of OK, but you need to use an external hardware switch to turn it back on. It even seems to turn off while mid-task, eg downloading big web pages. You can't just tap/swipe it alive again, you need to use the switch. And about 20% of the time when it unlocks, backlight doesn't come back on, competely randomly. The keypad's live, but you can't see the screen.
Other things:
- The EMail client is atrocious - not just usual S60-bad, but with really poor integration with touchscreen. Flipping through emails is painful, especially ones with HTML which comes through as an attachment needing the browser to open. Poor use of screen resolution - all you can see without clicking on a message is "about 20 characters of sender & title, even in landscape mode
- Menu organisation is frustrating. Moving apps to the bottom of the list makes them disappear. Somewhere there's a sub-menu or page 2, but it seems completely unclear how I accidentally found it.
- It took me more than 5 minutes to find the settings menu & work out how to turn off the (default!) annoying keytones. And some apps seem to unilaterally switch them back on again.
- The radio reception is flaky. It's much worse than my E71 with the same SIM & network in any given location, often only giving me 3G rather than 3.5G.
- The camera sucks, surprisingly - I expected it to be really good, but it's worse than the not-particularly accomplished one in my SonyEricsson. Might be Version 1 software again, but I'm glad I had a proper camera with me for the weekend. No proper flash either, just LEDs, pretty dismal on a top-end phone. And when you zoom in on some photos, it goes to about 2x... then displays a black screen if you drill down further.
The Ovi store has been discussed elsewhere, so I won't comment further. I'm also guessing there's not many N97-tailored apps yet, so maybe the selection will get better. It needs to.
I could go on. Bottom line, there's a lot of good stuff in the device (32GB memory etc), but the screen & UI just don't work intuitively. Just too much is frustrating. Nokia should have spent less time & money on fripperies (FM transmitter - cool, but who cares?) and more on power management and a better touch experience.
It's a shame - I wanted to get a bit of a reaction from my iPhone-toting friends, especially as the 3G S is only an incremental upgrade rather than a complete redesign. But I'm putting the SIM back in the E71 instead, so they won't even get to see it.
I'm sure there's a bunch of other cool stuff in the phone (I saw apps from Qik, Joiku and others, although no Skype), but I can't suffer the basics of the phone to make an attempt to try them out.
One last point - it looks really geeky when it's opened, like the MDA Vario 3, with the flip-up screen and (for real!) the spec printed on the hinge when open. Having "3G HSDPA. USB 2.0. FM RDS" written on your handset's exterior reminds me of a Mercedes E-class I saw once, on which the owner had put a handmade "Air Conditioning" sticker next to the model number E320.
Sorry for this guys, as I know a lot of people must have put a lot of effort into building this - but Apple isn't going to have any sleepless nights unless there's a serious attempt at a Version 2.
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